‘What am I doing?’: How Royals’ Hunter Dozier got in a funk (and found his way out)
More than a few nights last summer, a confounded Hunter Dozier drove home from Kauffman Stadium, pulled into his garage and stepped right out to grab a baseball bat instead of going inside.
If he was going to lose more sleep over his extended slump, at least he could first go out in the driveway at midnight and take a few more swings on top of the hundreds he’d surely taken at the stadium that day.
Until one night, he finally thought, “What am I doing?”
Dozier managed a laugh as he spoke Saturday outside the Royals clubhouse at their spring training complex. But the moment was an agonizing snapshot of his state of mind at the time.
Yet it also was the realization that triggered the turn that liberated him for a second-half revival from first-half woes that included a collision in May with Jose Abreau of the White Sox that left Dozier on the injured list with concussion symptoms and an opening day thumb injury that was at the core of his issues.
“It was a good learning experience for me,” said Dozier, smiling and adding, “I’ve had a lot of learning experiences; I’m sure the fans are like, ‘How much more does this guy need to learn?’”
This was its own case, though, one that illuminated a few fundamental challenges of the game itself that we sometimes just don’t think much about from the outside looking in.
Like the ability to simply move on to the next at-bat after a failed opportunity. To be able to say “so what?” as Whit Merrifield put it when we were chatting about the general topic of hitting the other day.
“It takes a little bit of getting used to,” Merrifield, a career .291 hitter, said with a laugh.
Dozier also was simultaneously confronted with another intangible and complicated dilemma: the matter of knowing how to navigate the difference between a nagging discomfort and true injury, something Merrifield noted can be all the more hazy when it comes to someone wired as tough as Dozier.
“It’s a hard road to walk,” manager Mike Matheny said. “If every time something doesn’t feel quite right you shut it down, you never play. He was trying to do the right thing.”
Because of an abiding allegiance to teammates. And wanting to please fans. And, yes, to take pride in earning the four-year contract extension he received last March.
These are just a few of Dozier’s compelling traits that, alas, led him to being in a bind.
“I want to over-perform my contract …” said Dozier, who was guaranteed at least $25 million in a deal that could be worth as much as $47 million with a team option for a fifth year and performance-based escalators. “I’m very thankful for what they gave me, and I want to make them proud and show that they made the right decision.
“So, yeah, that definitely crept in my head.”
Note that he said that in the past tense. And at least from where we sit, we’re persuaded that he’s extricated himself from what clamped him down last season.
Most promising of all, he’s emerged with a better understanding of how he got stranded that could be pivotal in what he’s able to produce in the years to come.
Certainly, it’s not hard to track what gridlocked Dozier, who is earnest, humble and proud and ascended to this level (including a 2019 season in which he had 26 home runs and 84 RBIs and led the major leagues in triples with 10) because of a few admirable constants.
From the forensic trail of shattered glass, cratered walls, wrecked ceiling fans and busted lamps he inflicted on his childhood home to the big leagues, Dozier came to figure anything could be solved by toting a bat and toiling more and longer and harder.
Especially when it comes to the game that has so consumed him all his life. That’s why he could hit 300 balls off a tee as a child but still be waiting, bat in hand, for his father to come home and pitch to him in the batting cage fashioned in their backyard in Denton, Texas.
“I didn’t know if his swing was going to go out, or if my arm was going to go out first,” his father, Kelly, said when we visited the home in 2019.
That’s all served Dozier quite well in many ways.
But it also helps explain an utterly lost first half of the 2021 season, one that began with the thumb injury that cascaded into a series of well-meaning but ill-considered adjustments and plummeted into a full-fledged funk.
“I didn’t handle it well,” he said. “For me, when things don’t go well, I just work harder, and it’s sometimes a curse. I kind of dug myself a hole in the (batting) cage and just never left.”
In subconsciously trying to protect the thumb, among other issues, he tended to fly open in his stance. To the point where even when he was trying to take a pitch the other way he appeared to be trying to pull everything.
Instead of realizing the thumb injury was debilitating him and acknowledging that more time off would be prudent, Dozier essentially doubled down on working his way out of it and little by little started going further astray.
“Then I spent hours in the cage trying to find something that maybe didn’t even need to be found if I just found patience,” he said. “Then I think I just kind of created some bad habits and mentally just became exhausted. Because I would work so hard and then have no success during the game. Next day, work so hard and then no success.”
Which brings us back to those lonely nights in the driveway, after midnight with his wife and children asleep inside.
(Told this story, Matheny understood the feeling. As a player, he remembered coming home late at night and going right into the batting cage he’d had built into his garage. “Straight upstairs and take mad hacks,” he said, adding, “I just got worse is all I did.”)
This was how Dozier had found himself all his life:
“When things don’t feel right,” he said, “I just always wanted to have the bat.”
At some point this time around, though, he realized treating it like that was all becoming self-defeating.
“I really just kind of said, ‘OK, whatever … I’m going to stop pressing; I’m going to stop worrying,’ ” he said. “At that point, I was hitting like .180 or whatever I was hitting. I had to stop worrying about my numbers, just go out and have fun competing and try to get back to what I was doing in 2019.
“Once I did that, things really kind of started opening up again for me.”
It sounds simple, and no doubt it was more involved than that. But one way or another, loosening his grip helped more than squeezing tighter.
After hitting .145 into mid-June, in the final 91 games Dozier hit .259 with 19 doubles, four triples, nine home runs and 34 RBIs. He finished with a .216 average with 16 home runs and 54 RBIs.
Not what anyone, least of all him, had hoped or wanted.
But at least it came with a testament to resilience and another lesson learned. One the Royals hope can make him a major contributor this season in a role that figures to be primarily designated hitter and first base with some outfield spliced in.
“He’s got it in him (to make a difference); we’ve seen it …” Merrifield said. “He’s a big strong man. He’s scary in that box when things are going well. He can handle any pitch to any part of the field.”
Even if he’s under the radar to some degree, obscured by the likes of Merrifield, Sal Perez, Adalberto Mondesi and Bobby Witt Jr. and by his own last few seasons (including his COVID-depleted 2020 as he struggled to get his lungs and energy back), Matheny reckons Dozier “should be a really big piece of the puzzle.”
Especially if he has solved the particular puzzles posed by last season. To be sure, Dozier didn’t explicitly use terms like “try easier” or “work smarter, not harder” and maybe he’ll still have some work to do on containing himself.
But he sure seems to have reconciled this: The next time he struggles, something all the more is going wrong if he’s standing in the driveway at midnight with a baseball bat in his hands.